SOLVED TrueNAS-12 on Shuttle DS77u

[blanchet]

I have encountered some pitfalls when installing TrueNAS-12 on a Shuttle DS77u, so I post the solutions here.

Presentation
Shuttle DS77u is a mini-pc with an Intel Kaby Lake processor, 2 Intel NICs and two harddisk slots (M2 + SATA).
This mini-pc lacks of IPMI and ECC memory but it is fan-less, so it is ideal to run jails and virtual machines without any noise.

Shuttle Global || DS77U SERIES - Specifications

global.shuttle.com

Pitfalls and workarounds

• By default the M2 slot is configured in SATA mode. To use a NVMe disk, enter the BIOS, switch the M2 slot to PCIe, save and exit.
• The two Intel NIC uses different chips: Intel i211 and i219LM, so the NICs appear as igb0 and em0.
• the Realtek RTL 8188EE 802.11 b/g/n WLAN module does not seem to work with TrueNAS-12.
• There is only two disks slots. I use a small M2 NVMe boot disk and a large SSD SATA for the ZFS data pool. There is no disk redundancy, but I have setup a ZFS replication to backup automatically the ZFS pool. I use a pull mode because the backup server is powered on only once per week.
• To run headless (without monitor), you have to disable the serial ports in the BIOS otherwise TrueNAS does not boot. (I have found this solution on the NetGate forum).

Finally I have a noiseless, headless mini server to run all my network services with TrueNAS-12.

 

[blanchet]

Because I have neither VGA nor serial console, I have the following error message every two minutes in /var/log/messages

Code:

syslog-ng[1384]: Error opening file for writing; filename='/dev/console', error='Device not configured (6)'

Procedure to fix this issue
Create a script to replace /dev/console by /dev/null in the syslog-ng configuration file.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
# Disable logging on /dev/console
PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
sed -i -e 's|/dev/console|/dev/null|g' /usr/local/etc/syslog-ng.conf
service syslog-ng restart

Save the script as /usr/local/bin/fix_dev_console.sh and enable the execution bit

Code:

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/fix_dev_console.sh

Then go to the menu Tasks | Init/Shutdown scripts to run it when the computer boots
ADD

• Description: Fix /dev/console
• Type: Command
• Command: /usr/local/bin/fix_dev_console.sh
• When: Post Init
• [x] Enabled
• Timeout: 10

SAVE

Reboot the server to check that the script works as expected.